A Tiny Grief

My friends are used to hearing me cluck and mumble about how badly I want a baby.  Even now, at my advanced age, I long for the warm little body, the sweet smell, the incarnate love that is a baby.  All my life I have either had a baby or had this longing for a baby.  It will be with me until I die.

Yesterday, while minding my own business at The Store, I received a call from DFS offering us not one but four foster children, the oldest being 3-year-old twins.  We are not registered foster parents.  I believe I've spoken here before about how our own children got through childhood relatively normal by the pure grace of God.  This was going to be a "kinship" placement, meaning we know the family involved and they had given the caseworker our information as a possibility.  I must tread lightly here so as not to violate anyone's privacy.  If you know who I'm talking about, please keep mum about it.

The fact is, according to the case worker, that every foster home in our county is full to capacity.  Part of the May 22, 2011 damage was a great loss of foster homes, and there were far too few to begin with.  Hub and I talked it over and decided that, with maneuvers that would make Bobby Fischer scratch his head, we could just about pull it off.  Sons numbers three and four were reluctant but cooperative in helping us prepare for the home visit at 9:00 that night.  We were ready.  Those of you who have seen our house may now pick your jaws up from the floor.

Son number one, a social worker, agreed with us that it would be murderously hard to undertake four tiny children on less than 24-hours notice, but that it was the right thing to do.  Aside from this one lone voice of support not one person, not one, thought we should do this.  Son number two was nearly in tears as we discussed the situation.  He had a long list of objections and every one of them was legitimate.

My reasons for going forward were also legitimate.  First, I had and have been praying for these children and the entire family.  I prayed for their safety, for their emotional well being, that they would land somewhere safe, where they would find compassion, patience, acceptance, and love.  That ultimately - the ultimate ultimately when it is all settled and they are a re-united family or not - they would receive the best situation for them, whatever that looks like, so that they could grow up as undamaged as possible.  Having prayed that for them by name, repeatedly and with great passion, how could I say it would be too inconvenient or too expensive or too hard to move over a bit and make room for them?  How could I say it was too great a sacrifice to change their diapers, fill their bottles, wipe their noses, and tie their shoes.  Those are such small things, and so needful to these bewildered and beleaguered children.

Second, I have over the past four months or so, been praying for the sake of my own soul that whatsoever doors are opened, I will with faith walk through them.  That I will do what is given me to do unless the Lord Himself stands in front of me.  Now this scares me every day, and it scares me more now that I see it in print.  I know I don't always live it.  I fail daily.  But I wasn't going to miss something this obvious.  I hadn't sought these children.  How dare I turn them away when He had sent them, the least of these?

So we plotted and cleaned and I began to mother them in my heart.*  We met with the case worker.  We were accepted and approved and starting to get really nervous.  Then he told us that he had to notify the other family that they wouldn't be needed after all.  What?  What other family?  We thought there was no other family?  But there was.  There was a foster family that was willing and prepared to take them all.  So we did the right thing and let them go to the family that could give them the best care.  We let them go to the family with the mommy who could really be there for them 24/7 as I could not.  We let them go to the family that already had the beds and the toys and the training in place.  And in spite of ourselves we were relieved.  And sad.

I went to bed feeling as though I had betrayed them somehow, even though I know full well that they are better off.  All day today they have been on my mind.  As I pored over Florida Bar v. Brumbaugh with my eyes, my mind was thinking that, if things had gone differently, it would be bath time, with bubbles and rubber ducks.  That it would be time for stories and snuggles.  That we could be having glorious fun with play doh and our hundreds of cookie cutters. That I would be giving someone a bottle, and receiving more nourishment from the experience than the baby was.  And there is an ache in my heart that wasn't there before yesterday.  I am having a tiny grief for a lost possibility.  I know myself well enough to know that I will always, to a certain degree, regret the decision we made.  You will all see me and I won't look any different, but I'll be different.  I'll be the one mourning the loss of four potentialities.


*Nod to Anne.

Under the Piano

Some dear people in our acquaintance recently lost their 36-year-old daughter to an aneurism.   It was obviously unexpected.  Aneurisms do not send notice. 

To:  Mrs. Happily Unaware

       111 Oblivious Way

Dear Mrs. Unaware;

A representative of our conglomerate will be calling on you at . . .

Remember that old movie device where someone on a city sidewalk would be struck by a falling piano?  This particular family seems to be perpetually under the piano.  I know we live in a fallen world and bad things happen, even to very good people, and God is good.  I know and believe He is good.  Still I wonder why some are such piano-magnets.

I haven’t spoken to this family.  I haven’t written a note.  I know I should.  Words, after all, are “my thing.”  On this instance, however, the muse has been silent.  What a crock of cop-out.  But it is true that I don’t know what to say.  Even the sweet truth that God is faithful, a truth that they know through experience far better than I, sounds like a platitude at a time like this.  Still, it is the only comfort there is. 

What I would like to say is that it has all been a horrible mistake.  That their daughter is not gone.  That she’s just been vacationing in some small Amish village where there is no cell service.  That she will be dropping by soon to hug them and collect her three children and return to the life she had been living on Oblivious Way until last week when she went to bed Unaware and they thought she had slipped away to Heaven.  She had really only slipped away to Iowa, and the Heaven journey is scheduled for later.  Much later.  After they have gone ahead of her.  Because parents should never outlive their children.  Never. 

Of all of life’s blessings, children are by far the best.  And of all losses, this is by far the worst.  While this sweet family would not deprive their daughter of Heaven, would not snatch her back to this hard life after the rest she has found, they would give anything and everything short of their souls and their other children to turn back time and somehow change this before the fact. 

This family is already under the shadow of another piano, rocking in the wind and worrying at its fraying strap.  Let us pray for them.  Let us pray for one another without ceasing.  In the end it is really the best we can offer one another.  In the end, we are all under the piano.